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2 | Time at the Crossroads

1938–1939

Some time later I made a move to track down the Communist Party. It proved more difficult than I had expected. There were no addresses in telephone or street directories. I asked around among people who might know. Most of them were rather cagey.

Someone suggested that I try the People’s Bookshop. A single small shopfront window gave into a shop not much wider than a passage, immediately next door to the Kerk Street entrance of the Labour Party Club in central Johannesburg, which, in turn, adjoined the Trades Hall, HQ of the Trades and Labour Council. The shop window held a collection of sun-yellowed pamphlets with curling pages and faded copies of some of the ‘Little Lenin Library’ series. Inside, the shelves held Left Book Club publications, copies of Labour Monthly, China Today, Moscow News, works by Marx and Lenin in English, German and Russian … and not much else.

Its staff of young women regarded me with caution, as if I were there for dubious purposes. I made some small purchases and then broached the subject of the Communist Party. The woman I asked looked somewhat startled, but said she would try to get word to the district secretary. I left my phone number, and a man calling himself Jack Watts duly phoned and suggested we meet at the bookshop at closing time. He turned out to be perhaps a few years older than I, a recent arrival from Britain. We fenced. I wanted to know all about the party and he wanted to know all about me and why I wanted to know. I must have established my bona fides because he identified himself as the district secretary and agreed to pass on my application for membership.

I had expected the party secretary to be someone fairly well-known in Left circles, but none of my colleagues had ever heard of him. It was a long time before I discovered that Watts was a pseudonym, or ‘party name’, as I learnt to call it. His real name was Gathercole and, like most of the white party members at the time, he considered himself to be semi-underground – or, as the jargon had it, ‘concealed’.⁹

The party was not illegal but it was in a state of deep decline after years of internal strife. It had withdrawn from the light into the shadows and split into factions and sub-factions of factions. Accusations and counter-accusations of ‘revisionism’, ‘Bukharinism’ and Trotskyism’ had been bandied about in a search for ideological purity. Majorities had expelled minorities only to be expelled themselves in due course. Internecine doctrinal strife had displaced public political activity until, ultimately, the central committee (CC) had been moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town lest it, too, dissolve in the crossfire. The Johannesburg party had withered, with debts unpaid and its offices repossessed by the landlords. Its printing press had been sequestrated and its former journal, Umsebenzi (The Worker), was defunct. All that remained was a semi-secret sect.

My application for membership was accepted and I was placed ‘on probation’ for several months, during which I would be required to pay regular subscriptions, attend regular members’ meetings and ‘carry out all tasks assigned to me’. Every explanation was couched in a jargon which was new to me, filled with references to ‘aggregate meetings’, ‘functionaries’, ‘democratic centralism’ and ‘factionalism’.

The only meaning of ‘aggregate’ for me was its building industry meaning: the main component of a concrete mix.

I began to learn the jargon, and discovered that ‘aggregate’ meant ‘general meeting’. I gradually learnt that the jargon was not South African but a special variety of international Communist-speak. In its most impenetrable form we called it ‘Inprecorr’ language after its main user, the journal of the Comintern: International Press Correspondence.

In addition to ‘aggregates’ the Communist Party had ‘functionaries’ rather than officials or office-bearers, a ‘Political Bureau’ (or PB) rather than an executive committee and ‘secretariats’ in addition to secretaries. The jargon gave the party a foreign, almost exotic air. But it also gave its members a sense of belonging to a select band, much as the rituals and secret handshakes do for Freemasons or Boy Scouts.

My first aggregate meeting was held at the south end of Eloff Street, where the shopping area expired, giving way to urban wasteland. It was in a decrepit office block in an unplanned sprawl of car parks, black municipal workers’ compounds, municipal beer halls and cemeteries of dead cars. The Bantu Men’s Social Centre, then the hub of the city’s black cultural life, was nearby. Further south there were only huge windswept dumps of white mine sand.

The party office was about as far out of town as one could get while still claiming to be ‘in town’. The building’s entrance hall and staircase were unlit. Mice, rats or cockroaches rustled in the passageway. A creaking wooden staircase led to a dimly lit upper landing. The party ‘premises’ turned out to be a single room in which were some thirty kitchen chairs and a table, and about fifteen people, black and white. They looked me over briefly and went on gossiping among themselves. I recognised only one or two, members of the Labour League of Youth I had not expected to find there. No one introduced me to anyone. I sat hunched in my chair until the meeting began. Late.

I had never attended a meeting with black people before, or been in a place where there was no apparent distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It was a dislocating experience, but not threatening. It all seemed so casual, so natural, that settling in to it was quite easy. I had expected to find myself in an exalted political club, but not in a totally new society, where black and white participated as equals. It turned my world upside down. The colour barriers which had been an inseparable part of my home, school and working life were missing, and all reason for them gone. The very ordinariness of what was taking place was more disturbing to me than their gaping absence.

I had come with romantic expectations of finding a comradely circle, a dedicated fraternity such as I had looked for and not found in the Labour Party. I had expected a gathering of tolerance and mutuality suitable for my vision of the new socialist order. It was nothing like that. Debate was fierce and adversarial. Speakers snapped at one another and attacked each other passionately and personally. The jargon flew – factional, sectarian, opportunist, revisionist. Could this verbal warfare really lead the way to the new world of socialism?

Only later did I come to understand that these wars of the aggregates were the last skirmishes of the years of feuding and faction-fighting that had brought the party to its lowest ebb. I knew almost nothing of that past. I did not appreciate that this was a party in transition, picking away at old sores in the course of rediscovering the essence of a Communist Party. That first aggregate meeting ended with a spiritless singing of the Internationale. The factions separated and left without much more than a curt ‘goodnight’. Outside it was Saturday night, raining and dark in a deserted neighbourhood. The experience nearly turned me off the party for ever.

For unexplained reasons aggregate meetings were always held on Saturday nights – perhaps as a show of dedication, or as a hair-shirt worn for the good of our souls. For everyone else in Johannesburg Saturday nights were dedicated to having ‘a good time’ – drinking, dining, dancing and movie-going. Only the Communist Party imposed this monkish self-restraint and even called absentees to account afterwards. Suffering the hair-shirt, in time I came to know the thirty or so men and women who constituted the ‘aggregate’ of the Johannesburg Communist Party.

It was 1938. The central committee had been removed to Cape Town and general secretary Moses Kotane had gone with it. A new district committee had been formed to revive what could be revived of the party, and to bury the past’s factional strife. Some veterans of past factional wars remained – some, like Willie Kalk of the Leather Workers’ Union and Sam Nikin of the Furniture Workers still fiercely combative and unrepentant; others seemingly reconciled to the new dispensation, like Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers’ Union and Edwin Mofutsanyana, the eminence grise of the black membership, and his then wife Josie Mpama (or Palmer).

The new district committee was an uneasy mix of survivors from the factional past and newcomers who had joined the party after the worst of the internal fray. It was made up of a mix of native South Africans with a good number of first or second-generation European immigrants. Together, they constituted a reasonable cross-section of Johannesburg’s population, though English-speaking whites were over-represented and Afrikaners and blacks under-represented.¹⁰

The only aggregate meeting I now remember from that time was concerned with a new initiative of the Minister of Defence, Oswald Pirow. He had proposed the formation of a National Register of white citizens whose skills could be conscripted by the state in times of national need.

Pirow was the most outspoken supporter of Hitler and National Socialism in the Cabinet and was responsible for the Riotous Assemblies Act, which seriously curtailed rights of free speech and assembly. His National Register would almost certainly have some hidden anti-democratic purpose. The aggregate meeting debated whether or not to urge people to register. Was the register a genuine preparation to meet the threat of fascism and war or the start of a Pirowite corps of stormtroops?

Eli Weinberg, in town from Cape Town, led the discussion. He was a small, vigorous and ebullient man who had been imprisoned in Lithuania for political offences while still adolescent. He had emigrated to South Africa without a trade and with very little English. He had hiked his way around the country, and as far as the mountains of Basutoland (now Lesotho), getting the feel of it, mastering English and acquiring a working knowledge of Sotho and Afrikaans. He was an active trade unionist and, at that time, the elected secretary of the Commercial Travellers’ Union.¹¹

I have forgotten the decision we reached on the National Register, it was, in any case, of no importance since the whole proposal sank from sight soon afterwards. That such a discussion should be held at all, however, is indicative of the character of the Communist Party. To some people there might be something ludicrous in the picture of thirty ordinary citizens agonising over a legislative proposition as though the fate of the nation depended on their decision. It might seem to echo the spirit of that declaration of the six tailors of Gloucester which began ‘We, the people of England …’ But it was a debate conducted in dead earnest, though no one participating in it could have had any illusion that they would materially influence the fate of the National Register. That was scarcely the point. The point was to find the ‘right line’ before exercising the party’s influence on events, however small that might be.

The party took its politics very seriously. The fact of a tiny membership and small public following could not excuse it from its civic responsibilities. That seriousness, which some might find absurd, was the party’s great strength. It reflected an inner conviction that ‘nevertheless, the world does move!’, that however small our own thrust, we were helping it move, if not now then some time in the future. This conviction that it was helping to move forward the course of history gave the party the determination and resilience which was enabling it to pull itself back from the brink of internecine extinction.

When I joined the Communist Party I thought I was ending my membership of the Labour Party. It did not work out like that. I was called to a routine new member’s interview with the CP secretariat, where I explained the reasons for my decision to leave the Labour Party. The secretariat agreed with my criticisms of the party but thought it was capable of being changed for the better … from the inside. My best contribution to the cause of socialism, they decided, was to continue to fight the good fight inside the Labour Party and, at the same time, maintain ‘dual membership’ of the Communist Party. I was only half convinced, but agreed to give it a try.

I was assigned to a party group and required to continue with all Labour Party activities ‘not incompatible’ with membership of the Communist Party. In today’s vernacular this would be termed ‘entryism’ or ‘boring from within’. In fact my objective had been ‘exitism’. Though I had been temporarily talked out of it, I had little faith in the prospect of breathing life back into a moribund Labour Party.

My CP group was made up of seven or eight others, all also members of the Labour Party or the League of Youth. Hilda was one of them. It was far removed from the crusading socialism I thought I had joined. It was concerned almost entirely with the same issues as those that had concerned the Labour Party Left I had wanted to get away from. Only the Communist Party’s constant concern with international affairs presented a sharp contrast to the near total disinterest the Labour Party had displayed about such matters.

The threat of imminent war dominated the agenda and the thinking of the Communist Party. Talks about an Anglo-Soviet treaty of mutual defence against Hitlerism were leading nowhere; negotiations had been relegated to a junior Foreign Office official with no power of decision. Germany was rearming apace. The Labour Party, completely wrapped up in its own local political concerns, seemed oblivious to the dangers. The Communist Party, by contrast, seemed focused on the war threat and the need for an Anglo-Soviet treaty above everything else.

Late that year Stalin issued a warning that, in the absence of such a treaty, the USSR would not be prepared to ‘pull the chestnuts out of the fire’ for the West. To us in the Communist Party that was a signal. We were keenly aware of the imminence of war, but were taken by surprise by the manner of its coming. A surprise Soviet announcement that it had negotiated a mutual non-aggression pact with Germany caught us totally unawares. Perhaps we had been giving so much attention to the menace of fascism at home that we had not foreseen the possibilities of radical changes of scene abroad. Even so, the Soviet change of direction created little upheaval in our ranks, although the shock waves split Communist parties in many other countries and led to mass membership defections. In South Africa, remote from the epicentre of the event, there were only minor rumbles.

The loudest of those rumbles I can recall broke without warning at a Saturday night ‘aggregate’. There was nothing on the agenda to prepare us for a dramatic denunciation of ‘Soviet betrayal’, made by one of the party’s intellectual eminences, Hymie Basner. He was a radical lawyer and formidable orator, a short, stocky, red-faced man with a choleric disposition and a fine flow of language.

In a burst of passion he spoke of his bitter disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party. He condemned the immorality and opportunism of the Soviet-German pact and then dropped his bombshell. He was leaving the party forever.

Those who knew him better than I may have been forewarned. To me, his speech came as a shock, almost as a blasphemy. But no one chose to reply. In dead silence he rose and started to stamp out, then turned in the doorway and fired a parting shot: ‘Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone!’

What he meant I do not know, but inside the party his departure created a minor stir. Outside, in all the turmoil of impending war, it passed almost without notice. Nothing more was heard of it until months later, when Basner broke his silence in a letter to the press, repeating his denunciation of the USSR and defending his defection from the party.

Few party members followed him. If the Soviet-German pact had caught us unprepared, we were mentally prepared for war when Hitler’s armies launched their attack on Poland and Britain formally declared itself at war with Germany. It was the end of an era of appeasement in Europe.

In South Africa war brought to the surface all the strains in parliamentary politics which had been hidden for a decade by the Smuts-Hertzog coalition. During the pre-war economic crisis of the 1930s contradictions between SAP and Nationalist factions had been papered over by the creation of a single party of white supremacy, the ‘United Party’ (UP).

The UP government had mitigated the effects of the depression on whites by intensifying the exploitation of blacks, ensuring the supply of plentiful, cheap black labour for both farms and mines. Only a die-hard Afrikaner nationalist faction had hived off, to form a ‘purified’ National Party without the Hertzogite compromisers. This was the ‘official opposition’, led by a doctor of divinity, D F Malan.

The strains of war opened up once again the contradictions between SAP and Nat in the Smuts-Hertzog coalition. The Cabinet, faced with the need to define South Africa’s position in relation to the war, split apart. Five ministers voted with Hertzog for South African neutrality, six with Smuts for a South African declaration of war on Germany. No one knew how Parliament would vote.

The reckoning between war and peace hung in the balance. Malan’s National Party would certainly throw its weight behind Hertzog but the final outcome might depend on the votes of two minority parties – a small Dominion Party of Empire loyalists who would undoubtedly stand with Smuts and the four Labour Party MPs.

At the height of its popularity in 1924 Labour had been party to a pact with Hertzog against Smuts and his resort to martial law in the 1922 General Strike. That alliance had ousted the Smuts government and installed a ‘pact’ government under Hertzog’s premiership, in which Labour ministers had served. Some years later the pact had been superseded by the United Party government of Smuts and Hertzog, with Labour left on the sidelines of power and its present loyalties uncertain. Labour’s vote on the issue of war or peace could be the most significant decision in its history.

The Labour Party NEC met in emergency session in Johannesburg. Its three MPs and its minister, Walter Madeley, had flown up from Cape Town, along with its lone senator, party chairman Jimmy Briggs. I was present as ‘fraternal’ representative of the League of Youth.

The meeting was dominated by the parliamentarians, who all supported Smuts and the declaration of war. Compared with the CP debates, their speeches were strangely shallow and made little reference to the politics of the war, to the nature of fascism, to the fascist threat to trade unions and democratic movements or to the independence of nation states. They were couched in terms of indignation and of unquestioning patriotism, or, more correctly, jingoism or Britishism. Instead of serious analysis of the origins or possible consequences of war there was a lot of tub-thumping of the ‘my-country-right-or-wrong’ type.

That is, until M J van den Berg, who represented a West Rand mining constituency in Parliament, claimed the floor. He was a burly former miner, fluent in English although his first language was Afrikaans, and the undisputed leader of Labour’s Afrikaner members. He chose to speak in Afrikaans, though he must have known that some of the NEC members would have difficulty following.

His oratory and bull voice brought an uninspired meeting to life – and to real politics. All the bitterness of Afrikaner nationalism poured out in his attack on the advocates of war; all the pent-up grievances about British concentration camps, the destruction of the Boer republics and the deportations of those who refused to ‘hands-up’ at the end of the South African War. In a tirade filled with ‘blood-and-soil’ references he bellowed that the Boerevolk would never be prepared to fight Britain’s wars or accept Smuts’s call to arms. The Labour Party should give Smuts a simple answer: We will not join your war! Not now! Not ever!

His rant was heard in silence. No one seemed willing to respond except city councillor Ben Weinbren, who had learnt his politics as a one-time member of the Communist Party. His was the only substantial political speech of the evening, based on the crucial issues of the nature of fascism, its threat to peace and progress everywhere and the need for international unity to halt it.

No one was prepared to follow him. The chairman called for a vote. Every hand except Van den Berg’s was raised in favour of war. Van den Berg spoke again to make a short and bitter denunciation of a party which had sold its soul to British imperialism. Then he stormed out of the meeting, leaving a shocked silence behind him. His exit, it was obvious, would mark the end of his Labour Party membership and the reduction by one-fourth of its parliamentary caucus. It seemed inevitable that most of the Afrikaners in the party would follow him out. The meeting broke up, more concerned with the electoral implications for itself than with the fate of the country. Within days the party’s next most prominent Afrikaner, Dr Venter Odendaal, party leader in the Transvaal Provincial Council, left, taking many of the Afrikaner members with him.

When Parliament resumed, Hertzog’s neutrality motion was voted down and Smuts’s pro-war amendment carried, with a majority of thirteen. Smuts took over as prime minister and Walter Madeley entered the Cabinet as Minister of Labour. Little was heard of Van den Berg for several weeks. Then there was a brief announcement in the press that M J van den Berg MP had been commissioned as Captain in the South African Army and would be involved in army recruiting on the home front.¹²

I was a silent observer of Labour’s decision-making but a participant in that of the Communist Party. Labour’s decision had been pragmatic, settled in a single evening. The Communist Party’s required weeks of uncertainty before the debate came to a conclusion. Ironically, Labour’s quick decision might well have tilted the country’s balance between neutrality and war. The Communists’ agonising over ‘the right line’ could have no real influence whatsoever on the national decision.

Until the Soviet-German treaty the party line had been clear. It had been for a broad international alliance against fascism, if necessary by means of war. But in our view, the Western powers were more concerned with containing the USSR and socialism than confronting fascism, hence appeasement, the betrayal of Spain and Czechoslovakia and the foot-dragging over the Anglo-Soviet treaty. The Soviet-German non-aggression treaty clouded the certainty by taking the Soviet Union out of its central position in any anti-fascist alliance. The prospect of an East-West alliance was obsolete. And before our policy could be reconsidered in this new situation the Nazi armies crashed into Poland, and Britain and France declared war.

Our policy, which had seemed so clear for so long, was suddenly muddied over. Political parties change direction just as cumbrously as ocean liners. Ours was no exception. Our change of course was complicated by a tradition of deference to the greater political expertise and experience of the Soviet Communist Party. Before words of wisdom on the new ‘line’ were forthcoming from the party leadership our groups struggled on their own to adjust themselves.

George Findlay came to my group from the district committee to help us through the maze. George was a advocate with a golden tongue, a wonderful precision of word and impeccable logic.¹³ ‘The line’, we were assured, was not changed. We were still for a resolute world stand against fascism. The Soviet action had not invalidated that, though it had been a surprising eleventh-hour tactic to safeguard the Soviet’s own frontiers from a Nazi attack. The appeasers had been drawn against their will into a phoney war, still hoping for the communist and fascist armies to bleed each other to death.

We were for an all-out war, not a phoney one. That policy remained, even in these new circumstances. He argued his thesis brilliantly. But the question that bothered us all was this: ‘How can it be that we seek to prosecute a war to the utmost while our Soviet comrades and allies move in precisely the opposite direction?’ Findlay had, as always, a clear and logical answer. When two armies set out to make a co-ordinated attack on an enemy citadel from opposite starting places one army must march east while the other marches west. QED. That impeccable logic did not allay all doubts. We might have left the meeting spellbound, but we were not quite convinced. Doubts remained until we received confirmation of sorts from a press report. Harry Pollitt, secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), had also declared the war to be an ‘anti-fascist war’, to which his party would give its full support.

That carried a lot of weight among us. Our party had enjoyed a close fraternal relationship with the CPGB for many years. Our view of world events had been greatly influenced by the analyses published as ‘Notes of the Month’ in the British party’s journal, Labour Monthly, written by its chairman, R Palme Dutt. Divergence of views between us and the CPGB would have been quite as confusing as divergence from the Soviet party.

We were settling down to the idea that our policy was, after all, right and clear when there came a contrary declaration from the Soviet Communist Party. It declared the war to be reactionary and ‘imperialist’ and urged communists everywhere to follow Lenin’s advice of 1914 and ‘turn imperialist war into civil war’. This was startling stuff. We had no formal links with the Soviet party but its views carried enormous authority – its members had made their revolution and were building socialism, while the rest of us were still only talking of it.

We went back to serious study of Lenin’s writings on the First World War. They did not translate easily to a different war in a different age. There were few analogies between Smuts’s white supremacist regime and the Tsar’s imperial autocracy. Or between the all-volunteer South African and Tsarist conscript armies. Lenin’s war had been drawn from a reasonably clear clash of rival imperialisms over territory. We were dealing with a more complex war, whose substance was inextricably tied up with issues of democracy and national independence.

We were still arguing our way through this thicket when confusion was confounded further by a new statement from the CPGB. This repudiated Pollitt’s characterisation of the war and announced that he had been relieved of his position as secretary.

Before the implications of that had been fully taken aboard, a definitive communiqué from our own central committee laid down ‘the line’. The war was, in essence, a struggle between rival imperialisms. It was neither a ‘people’s war’ nor an ‘anti-fascist war’. Whether the committee had arrived at that conclusion independently or out of deference to the combined decisions of the Soviet and British parties was never clear to me.

At least we now had a formal ‘party line’ that conformed to Clausewitz’s aphorism that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’. We would continue the fight against white supremacists, the Smuts government and the war. We would not assist the war effort but concentrate on developing a mass people’s movement against white supremacy, for all-out resistance to South African fascism and for the victory of a non-racial democracy in our own country.

Some commentators have interpreted this on-again off-again party vacillation over the war as evidence of a party following the dictates of Moscow, like puppets. It did not feel like that from inside. Soviet views were always a factor in our policy decisions. The indecisions and vacillations were our own, indicative of our own seriousness when we made political decisions rather than of subservience to Soviet instructions.

Whether the CC’s line also wavered before settling down as the district committee’s had I do not know. But if it did, it had the courage to correct its errors. No political party can honestly claim that it never makes mistakes, though few others ever have the integrity to admit or reverse them when they become apparent.

Once our policy was firm it committed us to a twin-track attack on both white supremacy and the war effort. That put us on a collision course with both factions of white politics – government and nationalist opposition – who were equally determined that the war would not be allowed to interfere with white supremacy. But they were not omnipotent. The social, economic and political consequences that followed South Africa’s entry into war could not be kept – like the vote in Parliament – as just ‘white man’s business’. In the end, judgement on Parliament’s decision and its sole right to take it would be critically affected by that black majority which it had ignored and disregarded.

The party would be working to bring that majority’s aims and aspirations into the reckoning. That was certain to guarantee us a rough ride in a country where politics has always been a rough business.